Comedian and actor Azie Dungey recounts her time playing a slave for visiting tourists at George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon.

Ira talks to producer Elna Baker about Stede Bonnet, a nobleman who woke up one day and decided that his new life goal was to become a pirate. You can read the trials of Stede Bonnet online.

Every city's got a place like this: that weird no man's land on the outskirts of town, with junk yards and landfills. Charlie Gregerson grew up near that stuff, on Chicago's far south side, and he remembers finding debris from famous Louis Sullivan masterpieces in the garbage dump after those buildings were demolished.

There’s a museum in Baltimore that was created to memorialize the Black experience in America. It’s called The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.

In 1980, deep in a nuclear missile silo in Arkansas, a simple human error nearly caused the destruction of a giant portion of the Midwest. Joe Richman, founder of Radio Diaries tells the story.  Eric Molinsky helped report this story.

Paul Zimmer is eighty-three years old now, and he’s still haunted by something he saw in his teens. Something very few Americans have ever seen: The explosion of an atomic bomb.

Ira tells the little known story about one of the times we almost began a nuclear war with the Soviet Union—by accident.

Producer Stephanie Foo talks to author and pirate historian Laura Sook Duncombe about the most successful pirate of all time, Cheng I Sao.